P00LS
Role
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer
Date
2021 - 2024
Stage
Series Seed
Industry
Creator
VALUATION
$16M Raised / $330M Peak
P00LS branding by Josephmark
Introduction
By 2021, creators had built audiences worth millions — brand deals, sponsorships, entire businesses running on attention.
But every one of those deals only ever priced the short term. Coca-Cola sells a drink and a share of the company. Creators only ever had the drink.
P00LS gave them the other half.
Josephmark designed the original identity as a creative platform first, financial one second.
The Design
P00LS was loud. Saturated gradients, high contrast, real energy on the screen. The organizing metaphor was water: fluid, alive, generative.
Every decision pushed it toward feeling like a place where work gets made rather than a place where value gets traded.
The Mechanic
Every creator launched their own token with their own ticker. BLOND:ISH had $ISH. The token wasn't a platform currency — it was hers, and it represented a stake in her economy specifically.
Fans earned it by showing up: buying her latest Sound.xyz NFT, picking up tickets to her show, following her on social, supporting her in whatever ways she defined. She could then airdrop $ISH to specific groups of her fans, recognizing the people most active in her community.
Every creator token was backed by $00, the P00LS token, listed on Coinbase. Fans could exchange $ISH for $00 on our own decentralized exchange, which meant a stake in BLOND:ISH's economy was worth something outside of it.
Creators could finally give something back to the people who got them there.
The Strategy
Make it effortless to earn. Make it obvious to spend.
Earning meant meeting fans inside behavior they already had. Every form of attention got a verb: learn, watch, listen, buy, follow. Reading about a creator's charity work, watching their new video, streaming their track, buying the Sound.xyz release, following on social — all of it earned tokens.
Using them was the harder half, because a balance of 40 $ISH means nothing until it does something. So the uses were immediate and obvious: unlock exclusive content from the creator, discount codes on exclusive merch, early access to purchasing tickets, or exchanging them for $00. We held custody until a fan connected a wallet, then transferred everything to them, which kept crypto optional until the fan decided it wasn't.
Growth ran on the same principle. The creators were the distribution.
Every creator had a reason to promote their own token, because the token was theirs. A new single, an NFT drop, a tour announcement — each one was a moment to tell their audience about their economy, and every time they did, they grew P00LS. Ronaldinho's 81 million followers cost us nothing. He had every reason to post.
The same logic ran one layer out: YSL Beauty promoted KITTENS and Agathe Mougin because both were YSL ambassadors, putting P00LS in front of a global beauty audience through a channel we never had to buy.
Top Left to Bottom Right:
Aluna ($FEVER), BLOND:ISH ($ISH), Ronaldinho ($RON), Evan Mock ($MAHCOIN), Hugo Comte ($NIKITA), Carlita ($LITA), Cam Murdoch ($SHELLZ), Ed Banger ($EDBANGER), KITTENS ($TREATS), Lala Baptiste ($LALA), Agathe Mougin ($EHTAGA), Steelo Brim ($STEELO)
The Creators
Seventeen creators launched their own economies on P00LS, across music, fashion, sport, and publishing.
The Outcome
We raised $16M and built P00LS to a $330M valuation in three years. Seventeen creators launched real economies on it, with more than 500,000 fans becoming tokenholders. $00 listed on Coinbase.
Crypto's funding market collapsed in 2023. P00LS closed at the end of 2024, four years ahead of an idea the industry is still trying to build.
500k
Fans / Tokenholders
17
Creator Economies
$330M
Peak Market Cap of $00 Token
In collaboration with
Hugo Renaudin
CEO, Co-founder
Jean Baptiste Dusseaut
CTO, Co-founder
Bassori Grace